Queens man convicted of spying for China
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Shujan Wang, a 75-year-old man who used a Queens-based organization to gather and feed information to the Chinese government, was convicted on Tuesday. Photo via United States Department of Justice
By Ryan Schwach
Shujun Wang, a 75-year-old man living in Queens, was convicted on Tuesday of spying on members of his community and feeding secrets back to the People’s Republic of China.
Wang, a naturalized U.S. citizen who immigrated to the U.S. in 1996, now faces 25 years in prison after he used his own organization in Flushing to collect information on local critics of the Chinese government and feed it back to Chinese government officials.
In a Brooklyn court on Tuesday, Wang was found guilty on all four counts of an indictment which charged him with acting and conspiring to act as an agent of a foreign government without prior notification to the U.S. attorney general, criminal possession identification and making false statements to law enforcement.
The verdict followed a seven-day trial before United States Second Circuit Judge Denny Chin. Wang is expected to be sentenced in January.
“The indictment could have been the plot of a spy novel, but the evidence is shockingly real that the defendant was a secret agent for the Chinese government,” said United States Attorney Breon Peace. “Posing as a well-known academic and founder of a pro-democracy organization, Wang was willing to betray those who respected and trusted him. When confronted with his shameful conduct, the defendant lied to law enforcement, but today’s verdict revealed the truth of his crimes and now he will face the consequences.”
In 2005, Wang cofounded the Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang Memorial Foundation, which was located in Flushing and was well-known as an opposition to the current Chinese government.
The goal of the group, which Wang ran with other pro-democracy activists, was to organize people opposed to the Chinese government, and sought to bring reform and human rights to the nation.
Unbeknownst to locals, Wang was using the group to do just the opposite, supporting the Chinese government by collecting information about the very activists, academics and dissidents he worked with, reporting their aims back to China.
According to the group’s website, the main purpose of the organization was to “promote democracy."
Wang is still named as a co-founder on the group’s “About Us” page.
Since 2006, at the direction of four Chinese intelligence officials – all of whom are named as co-defendants – Wang gathered information on people in Queens who opposed the Chinese government and supported reforms in opposition with their regime.
That included democracy in Hong Kong, Taiwanese independence, and support for Tibetans as well as Uyghurs, a Muslim minority in China which has been oppressed and imprisoned by the Chinese government for years.
He would place the information he collected in email “diaries” to be accessed by the Chinese officials. These “diaries” included details about Wang’s private conversations with opponents to China.
He also communicated with his handlers via WeChat, a popular chatting app, and even met them in person on visits to China.
At least one activist Wang reported on to China was actually arrested by Chinese authorities.
When Wang was finally questioned in three separate interviews between 2017 and 2021, he repeatedly denied or downplayed his contact with individuals from the Chinese intelligence agency.
In 2019, Wang was interviewed by federal law enforcement agents at John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens, New York, after he returned from China. Wang lied and said that he had no contact with anyone from the Chinese government and that he had no Chinese government contact information.
The Department of Justice and FBI said that the conviction is evident work done by law enforcement and the U.S intelligence community.
“Today’s verdict demonstrates that those who would seek to advance the Chinese government’s agenda of transnational repression will be held accountable,” said Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Department’s National Security Division.
